This is the personal blog of Steve Lewis - aka sjlewis55. It contains (what he considers to be) interesting and amusing fragments drawn from life. Perhaps, it is in the marginalia that we find true meaning.

Monday, 23 March 2015

Here is a photograph I took of the solar eclipse of Friday 20th March 2015. It was taken from Hawarden in North Wales. I wasn't timing things precisely but it was taken at around maximum cover (as seen from my vantage point). There was a certain amount of cloud cover which, contrary to expectation, I found advantageous as it cut down on some of the light of the sun. Using various filters over the camera lens - and wearing two pairs of sunglasses and looking through filters - I found that the haze from the cloud could be largely eliminated and the crescent sun could be seen through the cloud more clearly than I could have imagined.

Tuesday, 17 March 2015

I found this image at instructables.com as part of a demonstration of 'How To Make The Cube Eraser Puzzle'. There the image is the other way up - I strongly suspect it to have been taken at a strange angle or published upside down. Either way, I prefer it this way up.

Looking into this puzzle, I find that there have even been videos posted online demonstrating how to do solve it. I must get one sometime and see if it really is as hard as all this proffered help seems to suggest.

Wednesday, 11 March 2015

Here are four more unattributed quotes. I can't say where they came from but I think that they are too thought-provoking to waste:

"Not only are their questions in search of an answer, there are questions in search of being asking."

"It is a terrible thing when you have ideas and nobody with whom to share them. It is infinity worse when that is the case and you happen to work at a university."

"It is easy to make worthless activity feel valuable. All one has to do is feel tired at the end of it."

"Like everybody else, I make mistakes. The only difference is that my mistakes are at such a level that most people around me can never spot them."This final quote is not necessarily as conceited as it sounds. If the author of that comment were, in fact, conceited he would never have uttered it in the first place; he would not have admitted to the fact that he made mistakes. Rather, this quote reflects what should surely be everybody's aim: not to make no mistakes at all but make instead only those mistakes that come when probing the limits of understanding.

On the whiteboard in our office, my colleague and I used to have a version this piece of dialogue on our whiteboard. We put it up to see if (a) any of the students who came to visit would read it and ask what it meant and (b) to see if one of those students (a part-time pole-dancer who was very much concerned about her appearance) would notice that we wrote it up thinking of her. (Nobody seemed to read it - certainly nobody asked about it; the part-time pole-dancer was one of them.)